This week marked an incredible milestone for Thryv, and for service-driven small business owners. Thryv’s mission is to provide an easy way for small business owners to modernize and provide an exceptional customer experience, end-to-end. And central to any small business is the ability to get paid quickly and cost effectively.
So this week, after more than 18 months of research, planning and coding, Thryv launched ThryvPay. This payment processing service is specifically designed for service-based small businesses.
Payments isn’t anything new to us at Thryv, as we have been helping our users get paid since 2017. Recently, we were ranked 4th in payment gateways behind only PayPal, Stripe and Apple. We feel that’s pretty good company to keep.
Unlike many other platforms, Thryv isn’t a “closed shop.” We don’t force you into using a singular payment system. We have integrated with Braintree, Square, Stripe and PayPal over the last three years. This allows our customers to choose the right option for them.
This concept is unlike what you will find inside Mindbody, Podium, Housecall Pro or QuickBooks. Each of these platforms forces their users to adopt their payment system only. We thought a more open approach was better, and in alignment with our mission of putting our small business owners first.
Along this journey, we learned about the true payment pain points our users experienced every day. We knew that ThryvPay would have to be built to compete. We’d have to deliver the best solution and provide functionality not found in the plethora of copy-cat payment services that have sprung up.
Sure, it needed to be competitively priced, but we knew it would have to go above that. It would have to unlock value and truly speak to the needs of service-based small business owners.
Identifying the Problems
Any new product should clearly and concisely solve a true problem its users face. A great product isn’t designed just to be sold. It’s designed to solve a problem. With more than 40,000 small businesses using Thryv to run their day-to-day businesses, we had a leg up. So, we reached out and spoke with hundreds of our users.
We asked them what they used to get paid today, what they liked about it and what they hated about it. We then had them walk us through their processes, which helped us uncover all the time-consuming workarounds, rules and procedures they had put in place to help optimize their profitability.
Workarounds = A Poor Experience
What we found was that service-based small business owners were willing to accept credit card payments online, but only up to a specific dollar amount for cost reasons. On higher ticket items, they would ask for a paper check to save money on credit card transaction fees.
They hated the manual work involved to manage checks and deposit them, not to mention the delays in receiving funds.
Small business owners bemoaned hidden fees, and most couldn’t accurately or confidently tell us their current rates.
They showed us how employees had to remember when to offer credit card and not, or remember to add a fee to transactions to cover the processing costs.
Ultimately, we quickly saw that the final experience for their customers was poor.
Breaking Through the Noise
Just recently, a competitor of ours launched its own payment solution. After what I’m sure was months of development, Podium “introduced” a method to text a link and request payment. Their advertisements professed it as the magna carta of payment processing.
Texting a request for payment is nothing new, Podium. Thryv has been doing it for three years with four processors (now five) to choose from. This solution either ignored who their clients are, or they don’t know.
Square and Clover have made a living with their elegant hardware, and have clearly positioned themselves for transactional-heavy, low average-dollar businesses. Their imagery shows restaurants, cafes and retail. They focus on hardware, point-of-sale systems, inventory, gift cards and all of the items needed to support businesses mentioned above correctly.
Tailoring Solutions for Our Core Customers
Just as Square and Clover focused on transactional-oriented businesses, Thryv needed to focus on service-driven businesses, such as contractors, home services, caterers, photographers, legal services, yoga studios, hair salons and more.
We saw that QuickBooks provided much of the functionality these businesses crave, but it’s overly complex to use, and in the end, was truly just an accounting software yearning to be something more. Business owners used QuickBooks invoicing because they already had an account, and they wanted the ability to get paid via ACH.
The noise goes on and on. At every turn we found incomplete solutions that were either overpriced or missing glaring functionality.
We found many competitors whose product teams found it easier to simply copy Square or another big brand player, versus truly talking to customers and building an innovative solution from scratch.
Delivering the Right Solutions
ThryvPay’s beginnings are just the kick-off, but we think it’s a pretty amazing start.
The Power of Choices
Small business owners are now empowered with choices. With ThryvPay, they can choose to only accept credit cards, only accept ACH, accept both, or they can even accept credit cards but only up to a dollar threshold of their choosing.
With these choices, small business owners can automatically tack on a convenience fee when customers choose to pay via credit card, which carry the more expensive transaction costs for the business. These convenience fees are a nominal price for consumers. However, they can significantly offset the processing costs for a small business owner.
Making a Good Thing Even Better
ThryvPay isn’t the first platform to enable recurring payment options. Far from it. But we took that concept and improved it. We’ve enabled our users to create flexible recurring payment options daily, weekly, monthly, etc., or create customized installment plans for invoices and other unique billing use cases.
Connected to Thryv’s scheduling system, ThryvPay enables an SMB to set-up a recurring payment monthly, and then automatically subscribe their customer to a package of services enabling them to book, and track usage and redemption.
Now that is a fully integrated end-to-end experience.
Informed Customers = Happy Customers
ThryvPay may be a new offering in the payment space, but we are wise to the traditional games payment processors have played on unsuspecting small business owners.
Most of the business owners we spoke to couldn’t readily tell us their rates, or even their average rate. Of course they couldn’t because our competitors have gone out of their way to hide their extra fees and confusing rate programs.
With ThryvPay, not only do we charge flat rates, but on every single transaction every business can see the exact rate they paid, including any fees, and export it for full and complete transparency.
Next day funding and competitive rates are table stakes, so I won’t spend much time outlining them, except to say ThryvPay includes them. Where QuickBooks caps their ACH fees at $10, we capped ours at $9. Every little bit helps.
Where others charge more than 3% for card-not-present transactions, we charge a flat 2.9%. Charges made before 6 p.m. are deposited in your bank account the next day.
Focused on Small Business Success
I’ll end on service. Like everything else at Thryv, service is at the forefront of what we do. Creating the technology, pricing it and selling it to small businesses isn’t any good if you aren’t built to help them maximize it.
Like many of Thryv’s direct competitors, our payment space competitors only view service as a cost to minimize. They require you to purchase the highest tiers of their platforms to get a human to help. Just like Thryv, ThryvPay includes unlimited support.
We have a dedicated group of ThryvPay specialists ready to assist with any troublesome transactions, dispute assistance or funding issues that may develop. This is on top of the 24/7 support we include in every Thryv subscription via phone, email, chat or in-app.
Partnering with Thryv means you are partnering with a company ridiculously focused on your success.
Success is our reward for the successes of our users. When they win, we win.
We built ThryvPay to solve a problem that millions of small business owners face every day. If you’re already a Thryv subscriber, check it out.
If you’re thinking about becoming a Thryv subscriber, schedule a quick demo. We don’t bite, and a few minutes could improve the trajectory of your business.
